Swiss bank UBS is finalizing the purchase of the country’s other largest bank, Credit Suisse, with an offer of up to 1 billion dollars (930 million euros).
Meanwhile, the country’s authorities are preparing a change in the legislation to expedite the transaction before Monday, according to sources from the Financial Times. This change would make it possible to settle the purchase without the need for a shareholder vote in an effort to save the entity from the crisis in which it has been involved in recent days, marked by investor panic and only temporarily cushioned by an injection of liquidity from the Swiss Central Bank.
This agreement, as understood by up to four sources close to the negotiations, could even take place this Sunday night at a price of 0.25 Swiss francs per share, well below Credit Suisse’s Friday closing price (1.86 Swiss francs).
According to the information shuffled by the aforementioned economic newspaper, the situation “is moving very quickly” and right now there are no guarantees that the deal will end in the next few hours nor that it ends up agreed in the current terms.
Credit Suisse, which closed on Friday with a market value of about 7.4 billion francs ($8 billion), believes the offer is too low and would hurt shareholders and employees who have deferred shares, Bloomberg reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
Other financial firms, including Deutsche Bank AGare monitoring the situation in case Credit Suisse’s attractive assets go up for sale, either in a UBS acquisition or some other form of breakout, according to people briefed on those discussions.
On the other hand, BlackRock He denied this Saturday that he was preparing an acquisition of Credit Suisse. “BlackRock is not participating in any plan to acquire all or part of Credit Suisse and has no interest in doing so,” a spokesman for the New York-based firm told Bloomberg. In this way, the largest investment fund in the world thus came out in the face of information from the economic newspaper Financial Timeswhich claimed, citing several anonymous sources, that the fund was preparing an offer for the Swiss bank.
maximum expectation
Swiss and international financial circles await with great expectation the possible purchase of Credit Suisse, after a week of heart attack on the stock market, by its main Swiss rival, the UBS bank, an operation that some analysts believe could take place this weekend , in order to avoid a new collapse in the first trading session on Monday.
Rumors of the purchase of Credit Suisse (Switzerland’s second largest bank by market volume) by UBS (first), first published by the newspaper Financial Timesincreased this Saturday with information from the agency Bloomberg which ensure that the potential acquiring entity has asked the Swiss government for guarantees that a partial or complete acquisition of its rival will not cause legal problems or losses.
This information is considering the possibility that UBS, whose headquarters is a neighbor of Credit Suisse’s in Zürich (both are in the central Paradenplatz square), assumes the wealth and asset management activities of its rival, while it would sell the bank of business.
The Swiss economic agency AWP affirmed that both the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and the regulatory commission of the stock market (Finma) admit that the purchase of Credit Suisse by UBS is the only solution to avoid the collapse of the bank of the two candles .
